Linking Accidents in National Statistics to in-depth Accident Data

This report presents the findings from a study which examined two sources of data on road traffic collisions – STATS19 (Britain’s national database of reported road traffic collisions involving personal injury) and OTS (the On-The-Spot study, a research study involving on scene collision investigations in two geographical areas) – to help provide further insight into these data sources.

Each of these data sources has its own strengths and limitations: STATS19 includes details of a large number of personal injury collisions, as recorded by the police, but provides relatively little depth, while OTS records a small number of accidents in much greater depth.

This project links the individual accidents in the two databases, with the following aims:

• To compare the contributory factors coded in the two databases for the same set of accidents;
• To make an assessment of how representative OTS is of both the regional and national STATS19 population of collisions.